A beef about biodiversity in ag

Jana Mathia | Jul 21, 20110

I take a somewhat perverse pride in being able to tell people where the beef they are eating came from. Not just the USDA-recommended country of origin, but when it comes to the beef I serve, I can tell them the name, birth and slaughter date, personal history and family background of that particular T-bone.

My family raised a small beef herd, and I continue that tradition. The biggest herd I’ve had so far has been 11 head—including cows, calves yearlings and bull. Although small, it is enough to feed our family and have extra to trade and give to friends.

Like the big beef producers, my husband and I are looking at ways to improve our modest herd. The animals in our herd are Angus cross. Cross with what depends on how far you go back. We have two blood lines (I like being able to use a term like that) with one going back to my grandfather’s dairy herd and the other to Hereford cows my dad bought at a livestock auction.

Over the years my dad used whatever bull he could afford. Early on, that meant borrowing a bull from a man who raised bucking bulls for the rodeo. My first year taking a steer to a fair he was Hereford-Holstein-Brahma-Limousin and maybe some Angus somewhere.

None of my present herd has Brahma in them. Unfortunately, none of them have nice round rumps either. I can’t help but sigh when passing another herd and all the cows are deep-chested, wide in the shoulders with nice round rumps. That’s what beef is supposed to look like. After a summer gorging on pasture grass, one of our cows looks more like an over-grown pot-bellied pig with huge gut, pinched shoulders and bony rear.

I realize that one factor in the difference between our herd and the more desirable looking animals is quality of feed. We don’t have the money to pump a bunch of corn, alfalfa, and high protein feeds into our stock. One year we got down to moldy hay before the pasture was ready to turn them loose. My husband was shocked when he found out from a commercial cattleman how much corn he puts in his cows at calving time.

Another factor is genetics. We haven’t had the luxury of a wide choice of bulls. Bigger operations can afford bigger, better bulls that produce bigger, beefier calves. With my herd, we’re just focused on getting calves, however we can. A 15-month old bull from a commercial producer in the Benge area would cost $1,500. We have three cows to breed. If we kept a bull like that for three years, it would cost us more than $166 per calf, so that option is impractical for a herd our size. The bulls we’ve been using have come from my father’s herd or within our own, but none have produced the really beefy build we’re looking for.

One solution is the option of artificial insemination. A tube of semen only costs about $20; we could specialize a different bull for each cow and we don’t have to feed a bull through the winter.

I was leaning heavily toward this option until an article in the July 2011 National Geographic made me reconsider. The article was on food biodiversity and how the lack of it is putting our future food supply in jeopardy. The danger of having too much of the same genetics is evident to see at home as you drive through the countryside and see fields of wheat tinted orange by stem rust. As the article pointed out, much of our production is geared toward producing a lot of food, but in the process things like disease resistance and extreme weather tolerance are sacrificed.

The old story of the Irish Potato Famine is a classic case. The article pointed out in regards to horticulture, many strains of fruits and vegetables have already gone extinct as mainstream varieties take over.

This leaves me pondering about the balance between bigger production and a bigger gene pool. If I went with artificial insemination (AI), I could get something proven to produce the kind of animals I admire in other people’s herds. But then I would be cramming into the same gene pools as others. Select Sires, one of the biggest names in AI, has a selection of 60 Angus bulls, less than 30 Simmental bulls and three Angus-Simmental cross bulls—which are the breeds I would want to go with. This same selection is offered all over the continent. The same bull I use is being used by beef producers big and small in 48 states and Canada.

That does not bode well for the argument to get more biodiversity in our food chain.

Sadly, the more diverse and rarer breeds are, well, rarer and thus more expensive. I might as well go back to looking for a commercial bull.

So, what to do? Fortunately, my herd is already, ahem, genetically diverse. Hodge-podge might be a better way of putting it. One year of AI won’t be as detrimental to the genetic identity of my stock. But repeated use can be.

Overuse of the same genetic pool is irresponsible and reckless—just ask the Irish in the late 1840s. There is a balance to be sought between bigger and more—whether it be wheat kernels or calves—and having the diversity to protect against disease and inclement conditions. While genetic engineering and controlled breeding programs are striving to be a one-size-fits-all answer, maybe once in a while, at least for us little guys, we need to break out the heirloom seeds or borrow the neighbor’s ugly cross bull, just to keep things interesting.